


La Petite Mort

by PlaneJane



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: M/M, Mutual Masturbation, Outdoor Sex, Religious Discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-31
Updated: 2017-07-31
Packaged: 2018-12-09 11:52:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11668587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaneJane/pseuds/PlaneJane
Summary: Athelstan and Ragnar discuss religion, and take their friendship to a new level, while the impending threat on Athelstan's life hangs over them like a dark cloud:They sat for a time. Close as brothers. Close as lovers. The shadow of a soaring bird crossed the ground at their feet. When Athelstan searched for the bird in the sky, it had already gone, like the very last cloud disappearing distantly over the fjord.Into that vast blue, Ragnar spoke softly. “I want to have sex with you. I want to be your slave.”





	La Petite Mort

**Author's Note:**

> Dipping my toe into some fan fiction after a long break, and what better way than on a ship that sailed years ago! Forgive me, I only started watching this show a couple of weeks ago, and I'm ruined and sad that I didn't watch it when it first aired. Hopefully someone is still reading!
> 
> Also, this isn't beta'd. Sorry for any mistakes, anachronisms etc etc.
> 
> Set sometime during S3E6? Before Athelstan is killed, obviously, but after Ragnar promises to always be with him and protect him.

 

 

The grass was soft and fragrant beneath Athelstan’s feet; the last of the morning dew rising with the spring sun. A glorious, exalted day by any measure. Inhaling deeply, as he climbed the steep bank rising above the cove, Athelstan contemplated the trees and sky above, the earth and sea below. The air in Kattegat had a clean, sharp quality like none he’d breathed in any other place on his many travels. Perhaps it was the scent of home.

The arduousness of the climb burned the muscles in his legs, and wrenched the breath in and out of his lungs. Months in Wessex, poring quietly over scrolls, did not prepare a man well for the outdoor life. Yet, like a key turning in a lock, being here felt right; as if this was where he was always meant to be.

“Athelstan! Athelstan!”

Athelstan spun around at Ragnar’s voice. A moment’s rustle in the undergrowth, and Ragnar was upon him, the full force of his broad, muscular weight bearing Athelstan to the ground. They landed together with a soft whooshing noise, Athelstan on his back, Ragnar half on top of him, half off.

“Ragnar,” Athelstan wheezed, and laughed, trying and failing to get up. “What are you doing?”

Ragnar ruffled Athelstan’s hair, dislodging it from his ponytail until it spilled around his shoulders. He said, “I have missed you greatly, my dear friend. My dear Athelstan.”

“We only spoke moments ago.”

“But then you left me.” Ragnar frowned, and pouted as he was wont to do. “Was I not to be your John the Baptist? Was I not to follow you wherever you go?”

“Well, yes.” Athelstan paused as if in deep thought. “But not _everywhere_ , surely?”

“No. That is true. I don’t want to come with you when you take a shit, but everywhere else.”

Ragnar winked, and Athelstan melted into the sweet grass with a shudder of helpless laughter. Ragnar was as insatiable and demanding as a small child. But unlike the lustful wanting Judith had felt for Athelstan, Ragnar’s need for his English priest ran far deeper, to depths that Athelstan found at once terrifying and intoxicating.

“I didn’t come up here to take a shit,” Athelstan said, unable to hold Ragnar’s gaze, not quite comfortable with the vulgar expression.

“Did you come up here to pray?”

Athelstan hadn’t thought so. Not exactly. But he couldn’t deny that there was an elemental spirituality about this place that brought him closer to something resembling peace.

Ragnar looked down at him earnestly. “Do you want me to go?”

“No.”

  
“Good.” Then, quite unexpectedly, Ragnar touched Athelstan’s cheek with the back of his fingers. “You are so pretty, Athelstan. Pretty, pretty, pretty like a maiden.”

Athelstan rolled his eyes. So much for climbing up here to marvel at wonder of Creation.

  
“And so soft!” Ragnar pinched him first on his upper arm, then on his waist.

It was true. Athelstan had grown soft in England. His cheeks grew hot and he had to resist the urge to push Ragnar away. Ragnar often hugged and touched him, teased him about his small stature. But it had been years since Athelstan had felt embarrassed by Ragnar’s scrutiny, and Ragnar would be terribly hurt if Athelstan rejected his affections. This was how they were.

Athelstan tried to laugh, to wrestle Ragnar and roll away, but he was pinned. He could only manage a sulky turn of his head. “You’re crushing me with your gigantic arms and your bulging chest.”

Ragnar kissed Athelstan firmly on his temple. “Then I will move.”

He stood and pulled Athelstan to his feet. They continued the climb in companionable silence, to a clearing where they could see the waterfall on the other side of the cove, cutting through the verdant forest like a seam of shining silver on a princess’s velvet gown. All the while, Ragnar stayed at Athelstan’s heel, with his hand at the small of Athelstan’s back.

Despite Ragnar’s earlier exuberance, Athelstan sensed a sad desperation in the way he clung to Athelstan’s side. Athelstan didn’t know if it was because now that they were home Ragnar could let his emotions run as freely as the water from the spring thaw ran down the mountainside, or if, despite his promises, Ragnar was afraid for Athelstan. Not everyone was excited about Athelstan’s return to Kattegat. Indeed, no one was excited about Athelstan’s return except for Ragnar, no matter his part in the decision to raid Paris.

Athelstan sat where he could see the waterfall through the clearing, leaving space for Ragnar to sit next to him on the tufted grass, close enough his rich, musky scent filled Athelstan’s nostrils. His skin tingled at his friend’s proximity, like Thor was distantly whispering a warning. Athelstan touched the bracelet on his wrist, out of respect and recognition for Ragnar’s gods, but the urge would not so easily be abated.

Since Athelstan had given in to the pleasures of the flesh with Judith, his body had awakened in ways he had not previously imagined possible. He ached to be touched, to be held, to feel hot, bared skin on his skin. No wonder the ecclesiastical life demanded celibacy. This primal, animalistic longing was a grave distraction from matters of the spirit.

Athelstan shook his head. No. That was not his heart or his true mind speaking. It was the recited lessons of his teachers in Lindisfarne. Oh, they had meant well, but how could he explain that his capacity for joy, for awe, for wonder had increased one hundredfold since he had left the monastery, and more so since he had experienced these imperfect, forbidden loves? He inched his fingers to where Ragnar’s hand rested upon the grass and laced their fingers together. Ragnar sighed, as if he was at last able to breathe again.

But it was Athelstan who had been slowly suffocating, without knowing it, until this very moment. “I loved Judith,” he confessed.  
Ragnar unlaced his fingers and put his arm around Athelstan’s shoulders. “She was a beautiful woman, and far too intelligent for that dim-witted puppet she must call a husband.”

Athelstan nudged closer to Ragnar and let his head drop onto Ragnar’s shoulder. “I think in a different life, if I could have found a woman like her, perhaps I would have married.”

“Do you miss her?”

Athelstan’s heart clenched hard in his chest. “I miss the closeness. The union of mind and flesh.”

“The sex?”

“Yes. That too.”

Ragnar growled low and deep in the back of this throat, and squeezed Athelstan tighter. “Yet you still decline my bed?”

“It’s not that.”

“No. I know it is not.” He added simply, "Aslaug."

How complicated life had become for Ragnar in the years since he had found Lindisfarne and his priest. And yet, though his restless mind was like an infinitely unwinding bolt of multicoloured cloth, Ragnar remained as simple and warm and plain as he had always been.

They sat for a time. Close as brothers. Close as lovers. The shadow of a soaring bird crossed the ground at their feet. When Athelstan searched for the bird in the sky, it had already gone, like the very last cloud disappearing distantly over the fjord.

Into that vast blue, Ragnar spoke softly. “I want to have sex with you. Just the two of us. I want to be your slave.”

Athelstan understood—he might have been raised in a monastery but he wasn’t blind or deaf. Some of the monks had not been pious, and Athelstan knew very well what oils from the apothecary suited their private intimacies. The Northmen, however, used such an act to demean and defile a captured enemy or a slave. For Athelstan to use Ragnar in such a way—it was unthinkable.

“No,” he said firmly, with all the love he had in his heart for this formidable, impossible man. “You cannot. I cannot.”

“Cannot or will not?”

“Ragnar…” Athelstan searched Ragnar’s face and only saw his own affection mirrored in Ragnar’s expression. Turning in Ragnar’s arms, he placed his hand on the broad expanse of his chest. “It isn’t right.

“Who is to say what is right, or what is wrong?”

“The gods, perhaps?”

Ragnar released Athelstan and threw himself onto his back, his arms spread wide on the grass. “Let us not talk of gods, but of men. For if the gods would deny this to a strong and healthy fighting man, then they are playing a fine trick, and having a very good laugh at his expense. That is all I can say.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There is a place, inside a man’s body.” Ragnar’s eyes rolled up into his head, and a wide grin broke across his face, accentuating the fine lines that had started showing in the creases of his face. “When it is pressed… oh Athelstan, it is like the stars have exploded and fallen to earth. Yes, what a fine joke, that the gods should hide it up there, where a man must yield for his pleasure.”

Athelstan’s head swam at this information. He had heard rumour and dismissed it as sacrilegious nonsense. Had he been even more naïve than he initially believed? And what was this that Ragnar said about the stars?

He said weakly, “You’ve done it before?”

“Not with a man. But Lagertha is very skilled with an axe, especially the handle, before it is inserted into a blade.”

Athelstan’s jaw dropped, and then, as his incredulity bloomed into a sort of wild and uncontrolled excitement, he leapt up to straddle Ragnar and pin him by his shoulders. “You’re telling tales.”

Ragnar’s laughter bellowed from his chest, vibrating through Athelstan like the rumble of overhead thunder. He clasped Athelstan firmly about the waist, and urged him backwards, onto his hips, so that Athelstan was astride his manhood. Ragnar’s hardness was unmistakeable; his manhood as thick and firm as the rest of him. Athelstan began to sweat, as his lustblood rushed to his groin.

Ragnar palmed Athelstan’s stomach, and lower, over his erection. Judging by the way his eyebrows shot up, he was inordinately and smugly satisfied with Athelstan’s obvious arousal. “I am telling the truth,” he said, “as Odin is my witness.”

Athelstan could be persuaded. The memory of moving inside Judith—the heat, the tightness, the closeness of their bodies moving in unison—was fresh and vivid. What a gift Ragnar offered, to let Athelstan into his body, to pleasure him and love him. Yet Ragnar’s defiance of his countrymen’s customs this time seemed a step too far.

Ragnar squeezed Athelstan’s stiffened cock, but Athelstan was trembling and Ragnar must have felt that too because he said, lightly, too lightly, “If you do not want to, then you shall kiss me and we will say no more about it. I have my hand after all, and you have yours.”

Athelstan leaned forward, so that his hair fell around his face, and put his lips to Ragnar’s, carefully and shyly. Ragnar growled once more, and rolled Athelstan over, his kisses ardent and hungry, his mouth ravaging Athelstan’s tongue and jaw and neck.

Ragnar’s attentions were nothing like the soft and tender passion that Athelstan had shared with Judith. Nor like the slow and quiet way that Ragnar and Lagertha had sometimes made love when Bjorn and Gyda were small. Ragnar was insistent, searching out Athelstan’s skin, grazing his neck and the tender skin behind his ears with his beard and stubble. Did he plan to set Athelstan alight?

As quickly as the skarfyr diving into the sea to catch a fish, Athelstan was in turn emboldened. He pushed back, hooking a leg around Ragnar’s thigh, rolling his hips and grinding his hardness against Ragnar’s. Lightning sparked in his blood and made it sing.

“I knew it,” Ragnar growled into Athelstan’s hair. “I knew you boiled with passion.”

Breathlessly, Athelstan replied, “Only for you.”

They stripped bare, touching and kissing as they hastily shed each garment, as if they were marking territory on new land. Athelstan could hardly bear it when Ragnar kissed the scar on the top of his foot. Ragnar looked undone, as he turned his face pleadingly and asked, “Does this give you pain?”

“Not anymore.”

It might have been that nothing could hurt anymore, not with Ragnar covering Athelstan’s body. Their sweat and scent mingled, a potent heady mixture that fuelled Athelstan’s building arousal, as between their bellies, their cocks slid against each other. When Ragnar reached down, and took them both in one of his big, rough palms, Athelstan cried out.

In Ragnar’s piercing blue eyes Athelstan saw trust and absolute devotion. How he had come to deserve this he would never fully understand, but he did understand the responsibility. Athelstan was not a king. He would never wield power over any man—except this one.

Athelstan gripped Ragnar roughly by the back of his neck. “I would take you as my slave, only I don’t think I will last long enough. I am almost overcome.”

Ragnar’s breath hitched at these words, as if they spurred his own arousal. “Then finish. There will be other times.”

Athelstan closed his fist, as much as he could, over Ragnar’s. They rocked into the joint circle of their hands, like the ebb and flow of the ocean, as if they were one. Athelstan arched his back, and dug his heels into the grass, as his climax tore through his body, ripping forth a keening cry. He spent in thick white ropes that painted their bellies like a blessing. Ragnar soon followed with a howl and a shudder, his face contorting into an expression somewhere between pleasure and pain. Then all was still and quiet, except for the sounds of their heaving breath.

Ragnar used his linen to wipe them both clean, but made no move to dress. He returned to Athelstan’s side and draped a thick, heavy thigh over Athelstan’s legs so that he too was obliged to lie naked as his skin cooled. He found he was not shy, and that it was completely natural that he should trace the swirls of Ragnar’s ink with his fingertip.

Ragnar purred—actually purred like a cat!

Athelstan didn’t know if a solitary sound had ever made him so happy. The monks’ canticles had once filled him to the brim with joy but that was a different life, a different time, and that joy had been like a weak puff of air compared with the rousing gale that was Ragnar Lothbrok.

In time, as the fishermen’s boats returned to shore, they dressed and Athelstan pulled his hair back into a fresh plait. He half expected Ragnar to give it a tug but Ragnar had descended into a solemn and contemplative mood once again, breaking off a green stick from the undergrowth and thrashing it against some innocent fern fronds.

“Something troubles you, Ragnar?”

Athelstan had almost been afraid to ask. The way that Floki had been staring at Athelstan of late—making no secret of his hatred. It felt to Athelstan as if a confrontation was a heartbeat away, and he dreaded it, as well as the possibility he might be the cause of a rift between Ragnar and Floki.

To his surprise, however, Ragnar said, “Do you ever wonder if perhaps both the Christians and the Northmen are wrong?”

“What do you mean?”

Ragnar’s face twitched into a worried grimace, and he began to pace, back and forth, threshing the undergrowth with whistling swipes of his stick. “What if there is no Jesus Christ in Heaven, no Odin or Thor or Freya? What if these are only the ideas of men? What if we are all wrong and in their place there is something else? Or maybe nothing but our desires? What if when we die there is nothing but fire and ash and then we are gone, no more, into the air like smoke?”

Athelstan stiffened at the desperation in Ragnar’s voice. The notion did indeed trouble Ragnar greatly, as it should have done, yet he had been brave enough to say the words aloud. In his darkest moments, in his solitude, Athelstan had asked himself the same questions, and had understood that while he might not have dared to speak this heresy out loud, God still saw into his heart and mind.

He reached out to Ragnar, in an attempt to still him. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not? Are you afraid that the gods will punish me in anger? Is it not in the minds of men to question?”

“Yes. But it is not always their right to expect an answer.”

“You can answer me. Have you asked yourself those same questions? And do not lie. I will know if you are lying.”

“Yes, Ragnar, I have asked those same questions.” Athelstan grabbed the front of Ragnar’s tunic and bunched it in his fists. “And for what purpose? It cannot be true that there is nothing but earth and sky. It simply cannot.”

“Then what?” Ragnar rubbed his warm hands over Athelstan's, his voice extraordinarily tender and patient. As ever, he valued what Athelstan had to say.

“I don’t know. I think we do not yet have all the answers. And perhaps we never will, for it is a matter too big for the minds of mortal men.”

A look of peace softened the lines etching ever-deeper into Ragnar’s face and his stance relaxed. “This is one of the many reasons why I love you, Athelstan. I cannot talk with anyone else like this.”

“No. I should think not.” Athelstan laughed. “Floki—”

“Floki is a jealous child and unreasonably superstitious.”

Brushing Athelstan away, Ragnar started down the hill. Smoke plumed from the huts and Athelstan's stomach rumbled as he thought about grilled meat and vegetables, but he didn't want to let Ragnar leave the discussion there. He had to break into a jog to keep apace with Ragnar's long, determined strides.

“Please, Ragnar, do not speak harshly of Floki. He loves you very much.”

“And I love him. More than I can say.”

“Then let it rest, Ragnar. All will be well, and you will need him when we go to Paris.”

"Yes. Paris. I am so excited, Athelstan."

Once more, Athelstan had managed to set Ragnar's mind at ease, and that filled him with pride and happiness. He could live with being despised by every soul in Kattegat so long as he could have this confidence with Ragnar.

Striding downhill, the sun warmed his face and shoulders, and he knew that tonight he would dream of the River Seine, and an island fortress, and his dear Ragnar.


End file.
